No Real Change Can Come If Speech Is Restricted By Monopolistic Oligarchs
JVL Introduction
Many of us wish the false and the fake news propagated on social media giants like Facebook and Twitter would stop. Some urge these self-same giants to be more proactive in censoring it.
Here Caitlin Johnstone, developing arguments put forward by Glenn Greenwald and others, says: “Steady on!”
Be careful what you wish for. If internet censorship of dissident voices by monopolistic oligarchs continues to tighten, it will lose what potential it has for facilitating radical change.
Johnstone suggests we can fight back in other ways. And, she affirms, we simply have to.
This article was originally published by Caitlin Johnstone.com on Sat 17 Oct 2020. Read the original here.
No Real Change Can Come If Speech Is Restricted By Monopolistic Oligarchs
Loading article text…
Wake up and smell the toast burning. Democracy CANNOT exist in a capitalist state. The rich buy the elections as proven recently.
I find this a very clear and simple explanation of the problem we face with social media, while similar considerations apply to the mainstream media. Our experience of the suppression of free speech on Israel are but a foretaste of a wider distortion of information that threatens to engulf our lives. I think the situation is so serious that liberal-minded need to focus single-mindedly on making the media democratically accountable, over and above any other political cause.
I’m not convinced that ‘ rising up in sufficient numbers’ is a political category. Too much concentration on vote, not enough on voice… we need to defend the remnants of deliberative democracy or what used to be called conversation.
The article claims that:
“Of course people are free to start more fringe alternative social media platforms that won’t be censored. They’re free to dig a hole in the ground and yell into it without censorship, too. In both cases, nobody will hear them; a critical mass of people will never be reached with healthy new ideas and unauthorized information.”
I find this argument both unconvincing and technologically conservative. Surveying the mass of high quality, but generally small or niche, independent media sites and sources of citizen journalism spread across the world, it soon becomes apparent that the real problem is that although these sources collectively provide a vast pool of independent news reporting, information and intelligent uncensored analysis, there is very little connectivity across this information pool. This is the real reason behind the limited success of indepenedent media.
Indeed the average user of such alternative media sites is probably not actively aware of the existence of more than just a handful, which even if that user were diligently to follow each of them every day, would not provide them with the convenient format of a broad structured information source such as that provided by a large corporate media enterprise.
What is required is a project, or rather projects, of collaborative integration.
A typical such project would be to provide a website to act as a hub which would, by some automated or semi-automated procedure, informationally categorise and provide links to all the items provided daily from a large number of independent sites, chosen because of the generally high quality of the journalism or information they offer. The enormous resulting mass of information acquired daily could then be selectively structured by the user, by the provision of a user friendly technical tool which would prioritise and structure information according to the general interests or requested focus of the user. (e.g. Prioritise: “Black Lives Matter news and upcoming events” , ” Bollywood film reviews” , “Labour party”, “Palestine”, “Archaeology” )
None of this need require enormous capital or running costs if organised collaboratively, but it does require a far more innovative and collaborative use of existing technology. Facebook and corporate media are technological dinosaurs: we should neither be riding on the back of the former nor seeking to emulate the latter.